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Conflict in Israel and Palestine: Crash Course World History #223 Transcript Conflict in Israel and Palestine: Crash Course World History #223 In which John Green teaches you about conflict in Israel and Palestine. This conflict is often cast as a long-term beef going back thousands of years, and rooted in a clash between religions. Well, that’s not quite true. What is true is that the conflict is immensely complicated, and just about everyone in the world has an opinion about it. John is going to try to get the facts across in under 13 minutes. Transcript Conflict in Israel and Palestine: Crash Course World History #223 Timing and description Text 00:01 Hi, I’m John Green, this is Crash Course World History, and today, we’re going to talk about Israel and Palestine, hopefully, without a flame war. John Green as his younger Yeah, yeah big ask, Mr. Green, I mean, that fight goes back thousands and self thousands of years. Present John Green Except, thousands of years ago, there wasn’t an Islam yet, so, yeah, no. Also, let me submit that very little of this conflict between Israel and Palestine over the last Photo of war – soldiers several decades has been about, like, theological differences between Islam and running on a beach Judaism. No one’s arguing about whether the most important prophets descended from Abraham’s son Isaac or his son Ishmael, right? It’s not about whether to fast Religious paintings depict during Yom Kippur or Ramadan. It’s about land. Portraying the conflict as eternal Abraham’s sons and a fast or as religious makes it feel intractable in a way that, frankly, it isn’t. So instead, let’s begin, as most historians do, in the late 19th century. And instead of talking CCWH theme music plays about religion, let’s follow the lead of historians like James Gelvin and discuss competing nationalisms. 01:02 Okay, so in the late 19th century, the Ottoman Empire ruled over what we now know as Palestine. The population there, according to Ottoman records from 1878, Image of the Ottoman was 87% Muslim, ten percent Christian, and three percent Jewish. Everybody Empire; photographs spoke Arabic as the daily language and in Jerusalem the religious populations of people in Ottoman were roughly equal. To give you a sense of life in Ottoman Palestine, an Arab Palestine Orthodox Christian musician named Wasif Jawhariyyeh grew up in Jerusalem in the first decade of the 20th century learning the Quran in school and celebrating both Passover and Eid with his Jewish and Muslim neighbors. Ottoman Palestine was, in short, a place in which people of different religious faiths lived peacefully together. 01:42 All right, let’s go to the Thought Bubble. The late 19th century was the golden age of nationalism in Europe, and no place was crazier than the Hapsburg Austro- Animated map zooms in Hungarian Empire in which at least ten different nations all wanted their own on the Austro-Hungarian state. And in that hyper-nationalistic empire lived a Jewish journalist named empire Theodor Herzl who had hoped that Jews could assimilate into European nations but soon became convinced that the Jewish people needed to leave Europe and Colorized image of settle in their own state. The concept of Jewish nationalism came to be known as Theodor Herzl Zionism. 02:10 It’s important to keep in mind that most Zionists were secular Jews, so they imagined Israel as a state for Jews more than a Jewish state. In 1917 the British Animation of a secular- government, hoping to gain the support of Jewish people, issued the Balfour Jewish family; they Declaration, promising “The establishment in Palestine of a national home for the imagine Israel Jewish people,” a bold promise considering that Palestine was still technically animated map shows Ottoman, as they hadn’t yet lost World War I. Of course, they would soon, but Palestine as part of the it turned out that the British were over-promisers when it came to Palestine, Ottoman Empire because a year before the Balfour Declaration, the British had secretly promised British officials point to a the French that they would divide up the Arab territories and the Brits would keep map split between Britain Palestine. Furthermore, in 1915, other British officials had promised the ruler of (Sudan, Egypt, Jordan, Mecca, Sharif Hussein, that he would rule over an Arab state including Palestine if Palestine) and France he led an Arab revolt against Ottoman rule, which Hussein promptly did, so (Syria, Lebanon) 2 Transcript Conflict in Israel and Palestine: Crash Course World History #223 Timing and description Text basically the Brits had promised Palestine to the Meccans, to themselves, and to the Zionists. What could go wrong? Thanks, Thought Bubble. 03:07 So shortly after the end of the war, the British established a colony in Palestine, with the idea that they’d rule until the Palestinians were ready to govern themselves, at which point the people living in Palestine were like, “Well, now Photographs of British seems good,” and the British were like, “Yeah, but maybe not just yet.” Meanwhile, people in Palestine the British established separate institutions for Christians, Jews, and Muslims, making it difficult for Palestinian Christians and Muslims to cooperate and easier for the British to “divide and rule” the inhabitants of Palestine. Again, what could go wrong? Meanwhile, the British did attempt to honor the Balfour Declaration’s promise to Scrolling text “facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions.” Between 1920 and 1939, the Jewish population of Palestine increased by over 320,000 people. In fact, by 1938, Jews were just under 30% of the population of Palestine. And the growing Jewish population focused on purchasing land from absentee non-Palestinian Arab landowners and then evicting Palestinian farmers who were living and working there. By controlling both the land and the labor, they hoped to establish a more secure community within Palestine, but of course, these practices heightened tensions between Jewish people and Arab Palestinians during the 1920s and the 1930s. 04:16 Along the way, Palestinian Arabs began to think of themselves as the Palestinian nation, and that growing sense of nationalism erupted in 1936, when the Palestinians revolted against the British. With the help of Jewish militias, the Photographs of destruction British brutally suppressed the Palestinian revolt, but in the aftermath, the British caused by the Palestinian issued a white paper limiting Jewish immigration to Palestine and calling for the revolt establishment of a joint Arab and Jewish state in Palestine within ten years. This managed to leave no one happy. The Zionists were angry at Britain for limiting A mob of angry Zionists Jewish immigration at a time when Jews particularly needed to leave Europe, and the Arab Palestinians were unhappy about the prospect of waiting ten years for a state. And then came World War II, which was actually quite a peaceful time in Palestine. But then it ended, and tensions resumed, and the British realized that colonies like Palestine were far more trouble than they were worth, so they handed the issue of Palestine over to the newly created United Nations. They were like, “Oh, hey there, United Nations. For your first problem...” 05:14 So in November of 1947, the United Nations voted to partition Palestine into separate Palestinian and Jewish states. The Partition Plan called for two states Animated map shows roughly equal in size, but the borders looked like a jigsaw puzzle. I mean, you do the partition plan (which not look at this map and think, “Yeah, that’s going to work.” shows the Palestinian and Jewish states overlapping) Sure enough, it didn’t, and soon after the plan was announced, the cleverly named 1948 Arab-Israeli War broke out, with Israel on the one side and the Palestinians Photographs of soldiers and many Arab states on the other. The Israelis won, and when an armistice was and destruction in the signed in 1949, Israel occupied a third more land than they would have had under Arab-Israeli war the UN proposal. Meanwhile, Jordan controlled and later annexed the West Bank 3 Transcript Conflict in Israel and Palestine: Crash Course World History #223 Timing and description Text and the Old City of Jerusalem, and Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip. Over 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes and became refugees in the surrounding Arab counties. To Israelis, this war was the beginning of their nation; to the Palestinians, it was the nakba, the catastrophe, as they became stateless. 06:09 Over the next 18 years, nothing changed territorially, and then, in 1967, Israel and several Arab states went to war again. It was called the Six Days War because— Photograph of men sitting get this—it lasted six days. Israel won, and then gained control over the West Bank, in a military tank the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights. So the 1947 proposal looked like this; by 1967, things looked like this. Then the U.N. passed Resolution The animated map 242—man, they are good at naming resolutions—which outlined a basic framework first shows the original for achieving peace, including Israel withdrawing from the territory acquired in the partition; then shows the war, and all participants recognizing the rights of both a Palestinian and an Israeli Israeli takeover state to exist. This of course did not happen. 06:48 After the war, the broader Israeli-Arab conflict morphed into a more specific Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and this is a nice moment to note that not all Muslims Photograph of Arab are Arabs, not all Arabs are Palestinians, and not all Palestinians are Muslims.
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